Translation, Violence, and the Heterolingual Intimacy

Jon Solomon

languages

transversal

The question that
looms ahead of us today is how can we mobilize translation in order to help us
survive the potentially violent transition to a global society of one form or
another? The assumption of this essay is that the greatest source of violence
we face today is not political, but rather biopolitical: it concerns the ways
in which life becomes an object that can become treated in terms of “populations”
which are then organized according to various competing classificatory schemes
that oscillate between the biological, anthropological, and the political.

Translation is
related to violence in two, essential ways. The first intrinsically occurs in
the operation of translation itself, precisely because it is never definitive
and always bears some kind of metaphorical violence towards the original
enunciation or text. Any translation is inherently subject to the ever-present
possibility of counter-translation, against which further arguments for
retranslation can be posed, thus forming a kind of on-going linguistic
tug-of-war. Precisely because of this possibility, the institution of
preferred, “standard” translations inevitably governs not just linguistic exchange
but social organization. Hence, the second aspect of violence seen in
translation concerns the historical dimensions of social praxis, and it occurs
precisely when indeterminacy is resolved through institutionalization and its
disciplinary measures. It is for this reason that the politics of translation
must address the segmentation of society according to gradients of
majority/minority relations composed on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity,
race and postcolonial or civilizational difference.

In 2006, Naoki
Sakai and I co-edited an issue of the multilingual series Traces titled “Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference”[1]
in which we presented an argument for articulating the indeterminacy of
translation as a mode of social practice to the contingent commodifications of
labor-power and the nexus of knowledge that governs anthropological difference.
The call for papers for that issue proposed to prospective authors the idea of
bringing translation squarely into a
politically-informed discussion about the production of both social relations
and humanistic knowledge in the context of anthropological difference inherited
from colonialism. We did not hide our ambition to push the idea of cultural
translation beyond “strategic essentialism” to present a new vision of
syncretic knowledge and social practice that would directly subvert the
anthropo-technological status of “the West” as both exception and a form of
immunity. Central to this discussion was the notion of a biopolitics of translation. In a series of lectures in the late
1970s, Michel Foucault introduced and elaborated the assorted concepts of
“biopolitics” and “governmentality” as tools for thinking about the way in
which the processes of life – and the possibility of controlling and modifying
them through the technical means – enter the sphere of power and become its
chief concern. Foucault’s effort has generally been understood as an innovative
attempt to introduce a new ontology, beginning with the body, that would
provide a way of thinking the political subject outside the dominant tradition
of modern political philosophy that frames it as a subject of law[2].
“Biopolitics” thus names a quotidian sphere of ostensibly apolitical (or
depoliticized) social action and relations – what Foucault calls “the entry of
life into history” – that is nevertheless invested with crucial effects for the
production of social subjects. These effects, far removed from the role
traditionally ascribed to politics per se inasmuch as they concern population
management, nevertheless bear directly upon the construction of what is at
stake in the formation of power relations.

In order to use
tools from Foucault’s conceptual kit, however, we found it was not only
possible but also necessary to subject the latent and pervasive Occidentalism
in his work to a thorough critique while at the same time opening up
possibilities for an understanding of biopolitics in a global context. The
notion of a “biopolitics of translation” acquires conceptual validity and
critical importance with a view to the specifically modern – which is to say,
global – phenomenon of the linguistic standardization associated with
nationalization and colonial land appropriation. Ever since the concomitant
birth of philology and biology, modernity has been associated with the advent
of a global cartographic imaginary that places peoples with no prior ‘memory’
of migratory contact, or only ‘deep memory’ such as etymology, into relation
through the mediation of an imperial center. As the transition to a global form
of spatial imaginary, modernity
begins, linguistically speaking, when the project of standardization is
extended across all manner of social differences to encompass diverse
populations in the process of national homogenization (which occurs, as Jacques
Bidet argues, on the level of world system)
and domestic segmentation (which occurs on the level of “class” difference or structure)[3].
This process must be seen, in turn, in the context of contact with other global populations undergoing the same
traumatic process of systemic definition and structural segmentation. The biopolitics of translation thus names
that space of exchange and accumulation in which politics appears to have been
preempted by the everyday occurrence of language. Our research shows that when
“translation” is understood according to a representational scheme of the
epistemological subject, it names not the operation by which cultural
difference is “bridged”, but rather the pre-emptive operation through which
originary difference – what is encountered when translation is understood as an
act of social practice – is segmented and organized according to the various
classificatory schemes of biologico-sociological knowledge emerging out of the
colonial encounter.

Seen from this
perspective, the modern regime of translation is a concrete form of “systemic
complicity” whose primary function is population management within the purview
of imperial domination. In other words, it is a globally-applicable technique
of segmentation aimed at managing social relationships by forcing them to pass
through circuits on the “systemic” level. In Sakai’s research on the
transnational discursive structure of both Japanese studies and the institution
of the Japanese Emperor system, or again in the relation between imperial
nationalism and the maintenance of ethnic minorities,[4]
we learn that the geography of national sovereignty and civilizational
difference that constitutes the geocultural and geopolitical map of both the
world and the Human Sciences indicates an important kind of subjective
technology or governmental technique that has, until recently, been thoroughly
naturalized by an anthropological discourse of “culture”. It is only today that
we can begin to see how a multiplicity of disciplinary arrangements forming an
economy of translation (in place since the colonial era but far outliving
colonialism’s demise) actually produces differentially-coded subjects,
typically national/racial ones, whose constitution is interdependent and, at
specific intervals, actually complicit in a single, yet extremely hierarchical,
state of domination. Our aim in the Traces
volume was thus to trace a series of genealogies within which “translation” is
no longer seen as simply an operation of transfer, relay, and equivalency,
capable of bridging difference, but rather assumes a vital historical role in
the constitution of the social.

Address vs. Communication: a poststructuralist concern

In the remainder
of this short essay, it might be useful to backtrack a bit and consider the
limits of the poststructuralist approach to translation. The indeterminacy
exposed by poststructuralist perspectives provides a crucial base line from
which to see how translation is mobilized in a biopolitical way. Predictably,
we will argue that this indeterminacy must be further contextualized if it is
to avoid formalization and help us establish a truly effective basis for social
movements of critical thought.

The two key
aspects of Sakai’s understanding of translation are: 1) the distinction between
separate moments of “address” and “communication”; and, 2) the exceptional
position of the translator. Both of these aspects reflect concerns central to
poststructuralism: the former with the “event of language”[5]
above and beyond the determinate meaning of any particular utterance – the
fact, as yet inexplicable to science, that linguistic utterance in general is
possible for human beings; the latter with the logic of the exclusion or
exception.

According to
Sakai, whereas “address” indicates a social
relation (that between addresser and addressee) that is primarily practical
and performative in nature, hence undetermined and open to the negotiation of
meaning, “communication” names the imaginary representation of that relation in
terms of a series of unities denoted by pronominal identities and informational
content, i.e., who we are supposed to be and what we were supposed to mean. Theories
of communication, normative by necessity, regularly obscure the fact of address
in communication. They are derived from the extra-linguistic assumption that
supposedly “we” should be able to “communicate” among ourselves if “we” are a
linguistic community. Sakai writes: “addressing does not guarantee the
message’s arrival at the destination. Thus, ‘we’ as a pronominal invocation in address designates a relation, which is
performative in nature, independent of whether or not ‘we’ actually communicate
the same information.”[6]
The introduction of a distinction between address
and communication has the signal
merit of allowing us a way to conceive the radical exteriority of social
relationships to the production of meaning without a predetermined, normative
approach.

In itself, “address”
does not communicate anything, except to indicate the presence of “communication”
as a possibility to be actualized or not in the course of translation. Address
is thus an initiation to potentiality: it indicates a relationship essential
for signification to take place and order meaning, yet it does not signify
anything in particular. Although this potentiality is inherent in any
linguistic situation, the reason it is particularly evident in translational exchange
is because the possibility of failure, of “not communicating”, is immediately
apparent to all participants. What Sakai calls “the regime of homolingual
address”[7]
is thus the model according to which this negativity is understood as a simple
lack of signification, rather than as an unconditioned potentiality “to not be”
in the context of a positive relation. In other words, if in translational
exchange I do not understand you, it is only under the influence of the
homolingual address that I can assume
the reason for this incomprehension is due to sociological factors such as membership
in representative communities. In fact, if we really were not to understand
each other, there would be no way for us to check with each other to see if the
problem in fact arises from any factor (such as communal membership) in
particular. To equate not being “in” communication to the notion that addresser
and addressee are not “in” the same social group is to confuse potentiality
with representation. Being “out” of a social group concerns a question of
status that can only be verified through protocols of representation (the “membership
card” being only the most obvious). The institution of homolingual address is
thus based on a model of community abstracted from the notion of communion or
fusion – what Jean-Luc Nancy calls, in a celebrated treatment of the
philosophical limits of modern community, “immanentism”[8].
The potentiality to be “out” of communication, however, is the force of address
that inheres in every instance of communication regardless of representative
social status. Any instance of communication indicates a potentiality (the
moment of address) as well as signifies a determinate meaning. This amphiboly
bears important ramifications for a metaphysics of language revealed by
translation. As such, it includes two sides: one side is the actuality of the
event, the fact that there is language. It both indicates a social relationship (language is always initially a
relation between two or more people) as well as signifies a certain meaning. The other side is the fact that this
actuality (the failure to communicate) does not present itself as the result of
a power that has not been realized, but rather as a potentiality, a power
not-to-realize. Needless to say, if it is possible to choose to communicate, it
is always equally possible to try not to communicate. Can one be certain that
the attribution of non-communication to “objective” factors such as communal
membership is not in itself replete with unexamined institutionalized choices
(such as the standardization of language into national forms under the auspices
of the State) that would make trying-not-to communicate into a form of
communication? Such certainty can only be achieved at the unacceptable price of
rejecting the notion of social construction itself. Evidently, the effectivity
of this power “to not be” does not occur simply because of presumed gaps
between linguistic communities, but also because to try to communicate is to
expose oneself to exteriority, to a certain exteriority that cannot be reduced
to the externality of a referent to a signification.[9]
The social praxis denoted in our age by the word “translation” is the
linguistic situation that makes this feature – common, in fact, to all types of
linguistic exchange – most evident precisely because it contrasts with the
State-oriented representation of exchange between discrete spheres of a priori communal difference. Modes of
address that take this elementary facet of linguistic exchange into account are
what Sakai calls “heterolingual address”.

The heterolingual intimacy: a constructive dialogue
with poststructuralism

We can now summarize
several preliminary conclusions concerning the heterolingual address: 1) it is
not based on which position one
adopts (or, most likely, the position into which one is placed), but is rather
based on the potentiality thrown into relief by the exceptional position of the
translator; 2) the plurality of languages in a given situation does not in
itself guarantee access to the heterolingual mode of address, which still
requires the recognition of and commitment to heterogeneity in all situations,
even those normally thought to be “monolingual” (hence the ubiquitous rejection
of Jakobson’s notion of “translation proper”); 3) the ethics of heterolingual
address calls for the invention of new figures that combine the common and the
foreign.

What does the
experience of heterolingual address tell us, then, about social relations? Significantly,
Sakai characterizes it in terms of distance:
“In our case, failure in communication means that each of us stands exposed to,
but distant from, the other without
grasping the cause for ‘our’ separation.”[10]
Or again, a bit further on: “[…] the disparity between addressing and
communicating […] expresses the essential distance
not only of the addressee from the addresser but also of the addressee or
addresser from himself or herself”[11].
The heterolingual address is thus a form of ethics, in which all parties to
communication remember, in view of address, the element of distance in every
social relation.

“As you now speak, that is ethics”[12].
Such is the deceptively simple formula proposed by Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben at the end of a seminal work devoted to the metaphysical implications
of pronominal invocation that he calls, following Jakobson, “shifters” (the
usage of which oscillates, just as we saw with translation, between indication
and signification). Agamben’s ethics of enunciation is construed not in terms
of positions (as was the case in the
concept of “enunciative position” adopted by anglo-american Cultural Studies
and identity politics) but in terms of potentialities
– precisely, the potentiality not to be. For the poststructuralist critic of
translation, the point of interest would thus inevitably be drawn towards the
ways in which such potentialities are variously organized and reorganized into
modes of silence, rhetoric and logic.[13]

Does this ethics
carry only a negative injunction to maintain “distance”, as Sakai apparently
maintains, or can it allow, even necessitate, certain forms of proximity? If
the “intimate enemy” – to borrow from the title of a well-known work by Ashis
Nandy – is a salient feature of postcolonial relations, violence in our
postcolonial world cannot be thought without reference to intimacy. Beyond
this, we will want to ask: to what extent might the economy of distance
required by the ethical relation of heterolingual address be implicated in other
practical social relations, such as gender, where the distinction between
public and private plays an enormously important role, or again, intellectual
difference (Etienne Balibar’s term for the division of labor), where the
distinction between levels of knowledge plays a crucial role in the
organization of property? It is precisely because of these relations and
questions that Sakai’s notion of heterolingual address (if not Nandy’s concept
of the intimate enemy) would greatly benefit, I believe, by taking heed of the
call for intimacy issued by feminist
postcolonial critics such as Gayatri Spivak: “the requirement for intimacy,” she
explains, “brings a recognition of the public sphere as well”[14],
especially when it concerns segmentation due to class and gender difference in
a postcolonial context of translation. The emphasis Spivak places on the
importance, for feminist translators, of being able “[to speak][…] of intimate
matters in the language of the original” can be read as an invitation to
rethink the theoretical boundaries of community – precisely the field into
which gender relations intervene. Intimacy[15]
could thus also be construed as a call to obviate translation by taking a “non-native”
language as one’s own while at the same time requiring of native speakers a
comparable readiness to recognize in foreign accents of all sorts a new kind of
social intimacy.

Unfortunately,
there is no space here to consider the practical ways in which heterolingual
intimacy can be promoted and even instituted. Undoubtedly, the principal
obstacle incurred in the effort to mobilize translation against violence
without denying either the forms of metaphorical violence that inevitably accompany
translational practice or the possibilities for alternative social formation
that exist at any point in history, lies, minimally, in avoiding both the kind
of immediate fusion seen in Nancy’s “immanentism” as well as the kind of
distantiation that unwittingly converges upon a fraternal model of community.
Precisely because the heterolingual address is based upon the frail ontological
potential not to be, it bears an intrinsic relation to the
juridico-institutional notion of freedom, espoused by theoreticians of the
modern nation-State such as Ernst Renan, that requires a further settling of
accounts, particularly, once again, in a postcolonial context. As noted in
various ways by Alain Brossat, Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida, this
juridico-institutional notion of freedom has led, historically, to an obsession
with defensive – even preemptive – immunity as the other side of community. The
contemporary denouement of this
obsession is to be seen in the expansion of political ressentiment among populations in the wealthy nations of the world
(especially the contemporary “return to the West”), and the tendency to use
instruments of global power – including especially law – in a unilateral
fashion.

One of the areas
of study, besides gender, in which translation might be most fruitfully applied
to the problem of violence is thus to be found in the historical dimensions of
international law in a (post)colonial context. A growing body of engaged
scholarship, among which the writings of Blanco, Liu, Dudden and Derrida[16]
must be given special prominence, shows that translation has played a crucial,
biopolitical role in the transition from ancient imperial realms to a single,
global world divided into a geocultural system of sovereign nation-states and
migratory labor markets commanded by a dominant center. Translation not only
makes History (in the modern sense of
subjectivity), but of equal importance, also makes a World (the frame or ground without which subjectivity would seem to
be impossible). The legacy of this modern regime of translation is not limited
to the historical injustice inscribed in the very framework of international
law and the geocultural divisions over which it normatively presides, i.e. it
is not limited to the Eurocentric legacy of World
History as such, but extends in fact to encompass the very disciplinary
divisions of the Human Sciences, the anthropological presuppositions upon which
they are based (even today), and, perhaps most pertinently, the geopolitical
divisions of the post/colonial world order that organize, justify, and
rationalize biopolitical violence.

Frances Daly’s
critical evaluation of Agamben’s attempt to rethink the categories of
“individual”, “citizen”, “sovereignty”, and “general will” that underpin the
discourse of rights could be cited here as a final example of the kind of
constructive dialogue with poststructuralism needed to fashion a new concept of
heterolingual intimacy that could be mobilized against contemporary
biopolitical violence on a global scale. Daly’s critique would, to my mind, be
further enhanced (and surely modified) by expanding the scope of dialogue to
including not just the postructuralist reinscription of rights but also
language as well (the two are, in Agamben’s case, as in Derrida’s,
intrinsically linked). Indeed, Daly implicitly points to this connection when
she writes, the “attempt to rid […] nation-states of the category of the
refugee [in order to cover-up the violence of exclusion]”[17]
is both linguistic and practical.

Precisely the purview of
the heterolingual address…

[1]Traces is currently
published in English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean editions. The English
edition of vol. 4, “Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference”, is
published by Hong Kong University Press (2006). An essay presenting this work
to a francophone audience and drawing parallels to the advent of postfordism
was published in volume 29 of the French revue Multitudes. Cf. Jon
Solomon and Naoki Sakai, tr. Christophe Degoutin, “Traduction, biopolitique et
différence coloniale”, in: Multitudes
No. 29, summer 2007, pp. 5-13.

[12] Giorgio Agamben, tr. Karen Pinkus with Michael Hardt, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1991, p. 108.

[13] This three-part staging of agency in language is taken from Gayatri
Spivak, “The Politics of Translation”, in: G. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge 1993, p. 179-200.
In comparative work devoted to Agamben and postcolonial theorists such as Lydia
Liu and Naoki Sakai, we have demonstrated, for instance, how “the West” as
hegemonic subject comes to be constituted – in Agamben’s work itself, for
instance – through the operation of such metaphysical “shifters” in the
operation of translation. Cf. Jon Solomon, “Translation as a Critique of the
West: Sakai, Agamben, and Liu”, paper presented at the Summer Institute,
Chilhac, France, September 2007, jointly organized by the Department of
Philosophy, Paris VIII and the Institute for Social Theory, Chiao Tung
University.